No abstract

An ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is now the greatest threat to global public health. Herbal medicines and their derived natural products have drawn much attention in the treatment of COVID-19, but the detailed mechanisms by which natural products inhibit SARS-CoV-2 have not been elucidated. Here, we show that platycodin D (PD), a triterpenoid saponin abundant in Platycodon grandiflorum (PG), a dietary and medicinal herb commonly used in East Asia, effectively blocks the two main SARS-CoV-2 infection routes via lysosome- and transmembrane protease serine 2 (TMPRSS2)-driven entry. Mechanistically, PD prevents host entry of SARS-CoV-2 by redistributing membrane cholesterol to prevent membrane fusion, which can be reinstated by treatment with a PD-encapsulating agent. Furthermore, the inhibitory effects of PD are recapitulated by the pharmacological inhibition or gene silencing of NPC1, which is mutated in patients with Niemann–Pick type C (NPC) displaying disrupted membrane cholesterol distribution. Finally, readily available local foods or herbal medicines containing PG root show similar inhibitory effects against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our study proposes that PD is a potent natural product for preventing or treating COVID-19 and that briefly disrupting the distribution of membrane cholesterol is a potential novel therapeutic strategy for SARS-CoV-2 infection.

2) In Quantitative rtPCR section (Page 110, in material and methods) we would like to correct the following sentence from; "In brief, each reaction buffer consisted of a total volume of 20 μl containing 8 μl of 100 μM forward and reverse primers (4 μl for each primer), 2 μl of cDNA, and 10 μl power SYBR Green PCR Master Mix. " to; "In brief, each reaction buffer consisted of a total volume of 20 μl containing 2 μl of 10 μM forward and reverse primers (1 μl for each primer), 2 μl of cDNA, and 10 μl power SYBR Green PCR Master Mix. "